Climate Action

This Saturday at 11am there is a Getup! organised rally in Melbourne to support government legislative action on Climate Change. It is in response to an anti 'Carbon Tax' rally organised by conservative tools.

You should go. If you are unconvinced please read on, and hopefully my writings actually persuade you to go.

Worth Getting Wrong

"In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing."

- Teddy Roosevelt.

You should go because this is a moment of decision. This is a moment of decision between doing something and doing nothing. The naysayers are opposed to doing anything, you should support doing almost anything to actually address climate change in some way.

So what if the Carbon Tax has flaws, or emission trading schemes haven't yet led to a reduction. Doing something, is what is needed. Even if in a years time it is a massive cock up, there will be something on the drawing board to go back to.

Australia does the world a disservice by doing nothing. Not only because the effects of climate change are global, but because it parasitically looks over the shoulder of governments actually actively doing something, flawed or functional to try and learn the solution whilst bringing nothing to the table. This behavior is not befitting of a nation that aspires to global significance and leadership.

The naysayers seem to feel that failure to implement the right solution is catastrophic, irreversible and a dead end in terms of learning. They urge more discussion. This is legislation, not a constitutional referendum, the oppositions dilemma is 'bogus' discussion can continue even after implementing a carbon tax, carbon trading scheme or even rationing. The only difference being that discussions occuring with some kind of action in place will be significantly more informed than discussions without climate action.

Those in opposition urge compliance to the old addage 'when all is said and done, more is said than done.'

Opposed sure, but what do they actually stand for?

Take the Kyoto Protocol. Destruction of the environment is not only rational; it's exactly what you're taught to do in college. If you take an economics or a political science course, you're taught that humans are supposed to be rational wealth accumulators, each acting as an individual to maximize his own wealth in the market. The market is regarded as democratic because everybody has a vote. Of course, some have more votes than others because your votes depend on the number of dollars you have, but everybody participates and therefore it's called democratic. Well, suppose that we believe what we are taught. It follows that if there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren, and they don't have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational, because what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy. If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational.

~ Noam Chomsky.

You should go because climate action is positive. The opposition stands FOR nothing.

What does the opposition actually stand for? Why do the feel so strongly opposed to Climate Action? Who are we protecting?

I find the anti-climate change stance disturbingly vacuous, and perplexingly passionate. But there are clear losers from the introduction of a carbon tax - polluters.

Currently there is this terminology called 'externalised costs' say I'm eating KFC, it's a pretty likely scenario. Once I'm done eating I can put my rubbish in the bin. This costs me some time, or I can leave my rubbish, my mayonaise smeared wrappers, my greasy chickenbones on the table. This costs me no time. An employee instead or an impatient future diner will clean it up for me, I've externalised this cost, shunting it onto some other individual. KFC can absorb the cost (and probably does) in its prices, because it has little recourse. Generally I clean up after myself, because it costs very little.

Currently a company can spew shit into the atmosphere with no obligations to pay the costs of cleaning it up or mitigating the consequences. They clearly lose out if they have to pay the costs of the environmental damage they are doing. Currently it is free, they don't have to account for the damage and this saving can just be factored into their profits.

Some feel the cost of paying for this pollution caused by their processes or products would be so onerous, they wouldn't actually be able to operate anymore and thus have to move jurisdictions or shut down operations.

In essence this means the oppositions argument follows thusly:

"If we had to pay for the damage we are doing, then we wouldn't be able to do the damage."

Which I would hasten to point out is exactly the same argument of those in support of climate action. I make no bones about it, I want these industries to fail and dissappear or at the very least move offshore.

How can the argument be the same for both sides and conflict arise? Let me clarify, climate change effects everybody regardless of their station in society or geographical location (although the higher above the sea level you are the better off long term). The argument breaks down to 'who pays?'

Those in opposition stand for you, you as a human individual paying, and as Chomsky alludes to - your grandchildren. People who aren't even born yet should pay for the environmental damage caused.

There is no 'nobody pays' option. There is only a choice in how we pay. One way is for the industries with direct control over polluting to pay within the framework of their business operations (basically what is being proposed) through a tax or trading scheme. Another way is to simply tax citizens directly from their pay packets whether they are emitting greenhouse gases or not, which doesn't really discourage institutionalized pollutions, (they would have externalized this cost onto society in general).

Lastly there is simply leaving through the environmental fallout of climate change in full effect, this involves mass starvation, rising sea levels, weather based natural disasters, extinction of species, the collapse of whole eco-systems and in one form or another the collapse of civilization as we know it.

There is of course a gamble involved - climate change may be a bogus science, concocted by meteorologists with far less vested interests than those opposed to climate action. Isn't there some scientific debate?

Science is not Democratic

"Whenever we are talking about facts, certain opinions must be excluded. That is what it means to have a domain of expertise."

- Sam Harris.

You should go to get yourself informed.

'Science' is a word charged with meaning. It means "an enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world." Any fact about the world that you get to have an opinion on is an unknown and as yet untestable fact. Then you are engaged in speculation.

Here is what I know and it is enough scientific knowledge to convince me that climate change is probably man made.

1. Denser materials absorb more and retain heat for longer than lighter materials. Due to thermal inertia.

2. CO2 is denser than O2. CO2 is released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels in man made activities.

3. The effects of a warmer climate are cumulative. A warmer climate will melt ice caps at an increasing rate due to the loss of a reflective surface (the polar cap) and a warmer ocean.

These three scientific facts are enough for me to accept that climate change is probably happening and the consequences are probably dire.

What is the scientific debate? And whose opinions are valid in this debate?

I'm not a meteorologist or a climatologist, neither is Tony Abbott. But amongst people who do fall within this domain of expertise there is consensus. Scientific consensus.

What this means is that it doesn't matter what Tony Abbot, Barnaby Joyce or I think as to the likelihood of climate change occuring. Climate change will or wont happen regardless of our opinion. But in terms of any climate debate, there are opinions that are simply wrong, invalid and should be excluded. These are the uninformed, misinformed and just plain stupid opinions.

Science is not democratic, we don't get to vote on whether climate change happens or not, we simply get to vote on how we pay for it.

The Risks

"Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can't afford the risk of inaction."

- Rupert Murdoch.

You should go because it's probably the right thing to do.

Being generous and presuming that the scientific community may be wrong about the consensus they have reached that climate change is occurring, consider taking action as insurance. We can pay something now to ensure that something that may occur definitely doesn't. Or we can do nothing and risk the most catastrophic and unpleasant event that could happen to our species short of a Nuclear Winter.

The costs of climate action are really for most of us, quite insignificant, relatively cheap and only increase the more we delay. By contrast the costs of climate change are really, really, really, really expensive.

Thus follow Warren Buffett's advice - don't risk something important to gain something unimportant. The savings from doing nothing are not important, and it is being suggested you risk the planet, that I feel is important.

Democracy is not scientific

"In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party. Both represent some range of business interests. In fact, they can change their positions 180 degrees, and nobody even notices. In the 1984 election, for example, there was actually an issue, which often there isn't. The issue was Keynesian growth versus fiscal conservatism. The Republicans were the party of Keynesian growth: big spending, deficits, and so on. The Democrats were the party of fiscal conservatism: watch the money supply, worry about the deficits, et cetera. Now, I didn't see a single comment pointing out that the two parties had completely reversed their traditional positions. Traditionally, the Democrats are the party of Keynesian growth, and the Republicans the party of fiscal conservatism. So doesn't it strike you that something must have happened? Well, actually, it makes sense. Both parties are essentially the same party. The only question is how coalitions of investors have shifted around on tactical issues now and then. As they do, the parties shift to opposite positions, within a narrow spectrum."

~ Noam Chomsky.

You should go because your interests are being subverted through deliberate misinformation.

Kevin Rudd lost his office trying to introduce a taxation on abnormally large profits earned by corporations with no national allegiance from the sale of irreplaceable resources they didn't create, that would redistribute that natural bounty back to the community it rightfully belongs to and invested for the benefit of future generations.

It was this community that punished him for acting in their best interests, because it didn't bother to avail itself of the facts, whether it be the fact that BHP and Rio Tinto's share prices or profits didn't suffer at all while the Super Profits Mining Tax was on the table, nor did they concern themselves that even if those profits were redistributed away from shareholders, directors are under no obligation whatsoever to distribute profits to shareholders at any time in the form of dividends and would never be as generous as the government would have been anyway. They were convinced by the $120 million dollars spent daily on ad campaigns that had little factual basis convincing them that Australia's economy would go to hell in a hand basket if they weren't entitled to keep profits in excess of 40%. (or whatever).

Conversely Tony Abbott despite having the majority of seats in the lower house was denied office by a group of independents (and one Green member) who actually demanded of him to produce a budget for his proposed spending plans. Some described this as undemocratic. They were right, because neither the press or voting public bothered to subject him and his policy to even this basic level of scrutiny.

Democracy is not scientific. One can broadcast a message that has little to no factual basis whatsoever and influence democratic outcomes.

Wretched though it is, economics is scientific. The Super Profits Mining Tax would have been more beneficial to every average Australian than the compromise Gillard agreed to. This is the case no matter what Tony Abbott or any voting individual thinks. As Sam Harris alluded, certain opinions on economic well being are simply invalid, incorrect. The personal opinions of a mining magnate will not change the facts of what is actually in your best interests, but you can let it sway you. You already have, and it didn't even need an election, just opinion polls.

The same is happening with climate change right now. Climate change is scientific, not democratic, by that I mean that its the sort of thing that will happen whether Tony Abbott or anybody else personally believes in it or not.

In the domain of science we don't get to choose what we want to believe. We can only do this in democracy.

The point Chomsky makes is this, democracy can be swayed by opinion, and the vested interests in the private sector can simply outspend the government in making sure which opinion is prevalent. They need not present an opinion that has any factual basis whatsoever.

Scientifically it is my understanding the 'debate' on climate change is 95% of meteorologists believe it is happening and man made. 5% express some doubt as to whether it is primarily man made.

Democratically speaking any debate that conflicts with the private sector will be 95% opposed media spending and 5% in favor. Your elected representatives simply cannot defend themselves against the coffers of the businesses they are attempting to regulate.

They are subverting your democracy to serve their own interests. But democracy is still by the people, if not for the people. It requires your ignorance, complacency and unwitting support.

This is a direct challenge to the functionality of your democracy, and subsequently beyond doing the right thing, a reason to support a carbon tax and go to the rally on Saturday is that it is devaluing your democratic rights.

Do the right thing.

The business of business is business.

~ Alfred P Sloan Jnr.

You should go because even if it won't work, its the right thing to do.

There is a cliche in parenting pertaining specifically to doing the right or wrong thing. 'If your friend jumped off a bridge would you do it?' it is intended to teach the child to follow their own moral compass, moral imperatives and ignore infractions by others. I have little doubt that most parents and particularly parents that describe themselves as 'conservative' would agree with me that it is wrong for a child to steal other children's property, just because other children are doing it.

Yet we gladly suspend this thinking when it comes to climate change, one of the few things that could actually result in mass starvation and potentially extinction of the human race. At the very least an end to human civilization as we know it. Here it is wrong for Australia to act on climate change, until every other country (particularly bastions of functioning democratic and humanitarian leadership China and India) follows suit.

The logic being that we will export pollution and jobs to other countries.

Firstly, I would remind people of what ACTION on CLIMATE CHANGE actually is supposed to achieve. It is supposed to achieve the cessation of activities that contribute to climate change that fall within our countries jurisdiction.

The haters of climate action though, give those employed and invested in the industry no credit and demonstrate a distinct lack of imagination. Because jobs disappear does not mean they cannot be replaced. We already subsidize a large and unprofitable automotive industry, we can easily do the same for a large, emerging technology of the future such as solar. We can employ as many people as we like in this industry because there would be demand for its output even if we gave it away, that would render real benefits upon our society (free energy).

The naysayers claim to represent business interests and the market. This is complete fucken bullshit crap. They are just lazy people who would rather carry on doing what they've always done because it is easier than change and they lack the imagination to imagine a tomorrow. They are children trying to do whatever they can get away with, and that is kind of their job. But they are not representing a more informed view of what is good for business, good for the economy and good for you.

For a more informed view of what is good for business, good for the economy and good for you, take it from Drucker who LITERALLY wrote the book on management. the following is an excerpt from the effective executive and is I feel fittingly an effective criticism of the stand against climate change based on protecting the polluters' industries:

Du Pont has been doing so much better than any other of the world's large chemical companies, largely because Du Pont abandons a product or a process before it begins to decline. It does not invest scarce resources of people or money into defending yesterday...
...the need to slough off the outworn old to make possible the productive new is universal. It is reasonably certain that we would still have stage coaches - nationalized to be sure, heavily subsidized, and with a fantastic research program to 'retrain the horse' - had there been ministries for transportation back in 1825.

~ pgs 101-102 The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker.

Sound familiar? Because it is in essence the governments plans to invest in 'clean coal' research and carbon sequestration, rather than solar. I guarantee that pretty much anybody reading this book cannot claim to understand business better than Drucker.

Consider how passionate you would feel about defending the right of your parents to feed you (an infant) cheeseburgers for dinner every night, because cooking you nutritious meals incurs an increased cost in time.

Business has no right to a market, no right to profits, no right to customers. The market is a jungle designed to chew up business and spit them out for our benefit. As a society we have no obligation to protect the value of natural deposits of coal, asbestos, oil or anything else that somebody currently makes a buck out of. The stance of the opposition is in essence the same argument that would say 'Apple should be banned from releasing the iPhone because Nokia currently makes a profit from selling the Nokia 5160'.

Industries have a responsibility to themselves and their shareholders to invest in the future, don't give up yours to protect their past.

Metal, I don't love you anymore, but we'll always be friends.

Today I woke up and took the dog for a walk. It's nice. I reflexively thumbed the click-wheel of my ipohd and selected 'the roots' for my walking music. It felt like a refreshing relief for me.

I often talk up metal-crowds as the nicest crowds you will ever be a part of. Most of my encounters with metal fans are with big friendly fuzzy care-bare characters dressed in black t-shirts, denim jackets and the occasional studded accessory or chain. If I ever needed a hug at a concert at 2am I would hope I was in a metal crowd. That was my general experience.

But yesterday I discovered there are two types of metal fans. There are the aforementioned that are secure in who they are, don't care about changing trends or fashions or exerting the effort and financial commitment to following them and have found a happy dark place to call their home.

Then there are the type that are frightened, scared and angry, possibly bullied and feel ugly and possibly feel incredibly weak. Instead of addressing these issues though they cluster in a crowd of like minded people and far more aggressively than necessary say 'fuck you' to greater society.
I can only describe what it feels like, but it feels like imitation, it feels hostile and it feels pitiful. I imagine prolonged exposure would leave me full of either compassion or contempt and I hope its the former.

I guess the best analogy would be 'cornered animal', this brand of metal doesn't eminate strength but does seem dangerous. Like the whimpy kid in the trenchcoat mafia, you would never describe them as 'strong' but that doesn't mean they won't shoot you to prove a point. Like Fred Durst would probably stick a smashed glass bottle in your face if you called him a pussy, even though the conflict wasn't necessary and the action would only serve to prove that he was less than a pussy (possibly a dick).

As an artist, you often have the experience of picking up something you drew a while ago and your like 'man I drew this.' and not in a flattering sense, but this is good it means you have grown as an artist. Yesterday I saw a lot of bands I was into when I was 16 at Soundwave and some were awesome to see, others though I didn't even feel nostalgic, I just felt ... shmeh.

First and foremost Metal has gotten married. What I didn't witness yesterday but kind of felt - was the disturbingly holy matrimony between metal and christian rock. I saw Red playing on Conan and mentioned to then housemate Phil 'there's something not right about these guys... they feel... Christian.' I realise a lot of people are Christian. Most I know are Christian agnostic, never go to Church and literally don't sing about it. So what I mean about Red and what I kind of felt at Sevendust was this Gospel vibe, an incredibly shallow and unempowered emotional spectrum that says 'I'm hurting, somebody save me.'

I recall a lot, it makes me seem like a stalker most of the time, but I can't recall what I liked about bands like Sevendust, Mudhoney etc. the pre Nu Metal bands of the early to mid-90's. These weren't my favorite bands, I spent most of the time listening to Primus, FNM, RHCP, RATM, Tool and some others, but still I can't recall what if anything actually resonated with me.

But I think Metal and Gospel should get divorced, its a bad match and reflects badly on both sides of the coin.

The second matrimony is that of Punk and Metal. Sum 41 were the only recognisable punk band I checked out at Soundwave due to the schedule, and as my brother pointed out - 10 years ago they would have been the headline (I think they would have been alloted just before Blink 182) but Punk has - forgive me, somewhat died. People seem to forget pre-ok computer 90s often but the Tony Hawk days were huge, massive and I never got into the Punk Revival. The only band I could claim to truly have enjoyed from those days was Green Day whom were around long before Punk took over and are big long after (almost) all the punk acts have died.

But as Tenacious D sang in the 'Metal' you can't kill the metal. And I think that whats going on in Punk right now is trying to crossbread this genetic indestructability into itself in a desperate attempt to survive. It always seems to me that punk fans are numerous, but apparantly not numerous enough, they vocal and drumming traditions of Thrash/Death Metal seem to have particularly been misappropriated into Punk Rock. The use of double kick is profuse and the singers go off into screaming tangents. It's so metal it could hardly be called Punk, not even 'Punk Metal' as a meaningful genre.

I was looking for variety yesterday at Soundwave, and though I eventually got it, let's just say it was not to be found in the Punk Pavillion. Punk and Metal should get divorced because they are slowly suffocating each other and need the space.

Now as a snot-nosed kid I would have parochially stated that Metal drumming was some of the best, this is perhaps the biggest 'shmeh' thing for me that I experienced yesterday. It kind of started with Primus though. On Primus' discography you have two prominent drummers - Tim Alexander and Bryan 'Brain' Mantia.

Tim Alexander recorded for most of Primus' hey-day and is probably considered the 'traditional' Primus drummer. He was stadium rock style with two kick drums and a whole bunch of toms and I'm told 'very technical'. Back in the day I would have been all 'Tim Alexander is the shit'.

But getting psyched up for seeing Primus live I'd been listening to Brown and I'm not sure what changed in between now and 2000 but I was all like 'Brain is the fucken shit.' I think personality wise he was more of a fit for Primus and I have fond memories of the jerky and crap videos of early internet access days of Brain's antics posted on the primussucks website.

But I think in the same way that Southpark made the statement 'just because somethings complicated doesn't make it intelligent.' I think my easy reverence for drummers who play massive kits and play 'real fast' has dissappeared, and seeing live music probably helps because the beat is what you can dance to.

Somewhat hypocritacally this doesn't really apply to Tim Alexander so much, his beats are texturally interesting, and his return to Primus took them in a prog-rock direction that creates these sprawling rambling hypnotic sets that are head and shoulders above any other live music experience to be witnessed at Soundwave (in my opinion).

But the beats hammered furiously out by all these double kick weilding metal and punk-metal drummers are just... plain... boring. I don't get it anymore, it isn't impressive and it's no fun to be in the crowd to witness. It's just these long winded chops, and a beat you are supposed to jump up and down to but due to sheer physics you can't.

I'm sure the happy-metal fans would tell me that I was just seeing crap bands like Bullet For My Valentine, Stonesour, Sevendust and Rob Zombie with 'shmeh' drummers. And they are probably right.

My day was made though by the metal fan that yelled out between 'One Day as a Lion' numbers 'Play some real music' that relieved much tension and embarassment I had about hanging around white people. They just don't get it. Jon Theodore had a basic 5 piece drum set, made up Bonham style with one rack tom and two floors, and he just owned, schooled and fucked every other drummer there.

There is vernacular that you don't even need to describe the metal drummers - feel, groove, dance and perhaps even 'beat' but the key difference is this - the better the drummer the more you want to shift your weight from side to side in the audience and the less you want to jump directly straight up and down.

I don't want to make this a race thing, but the drummers at Good Vibes put the dance in the music, it's pretty easy to let all the Soundwave drummers wash over you impassively. Jon Theodore created so much space, this is something that now drummer of Primus Jay is pretty good at too, it is a pleasure to watch the Primus band members talk to eachother like jazz musicians through their instruments without ever losing the shape of the song. But Jay is a bit of a Tim Alexander replacement rather than having a distinct feel to him.

I no longer know where this post is going, it has become an ignorant persons discussion of drumming, but a glance at the post title tells me I should move on to the 'we'll always be friends' part.

There are metal bands that have plenty to offer, Tool and particularly Danny Carey on the drums has so much to offer and longevity as well I'm sure I will be listening to Aenima in my 50s. Sepultura with their Afro-Brazillian influences are great, again particularly for the distinctness of the drumming. Pantera tellingly are described as 'Groove-metal' and you can groove to it. Even Nu Metal can be appreciated with Irony like a bad sweater.

I will always have a fondness for metal, but like getting over an old love, you are never really aware of when it happens, but one day you just realise you don't occupy that same emotional space. I think this can only be a good commentary on my emotional constitution these days. I feel I am in no danger of being mistaken for a type 2 'Sad metal' fan, because thankfully I just can't relate to the insecurity in numbers. I lack the commitment and taste buds to be a type 1, but I don't begrudge them.

Iron Maiden were the headline at Soundwave and Iron Maiden were the crowd. I can't conclude that the crowd was in the same headspace as the band, but Iron Maiden are clearly happy guys that live securely in their own happy Iron Maiden world. They do wonderful things and you can tell are full of love for what they do and people in general. That's the kind of metal I can always be friends with, even if nothing about the band is easy on the eye - from the horrific artwork to the aged band members, they play face melters and they love it. They rock stadiums and they love it. They pack their elaborate sets into their own airplane and they love it. They love their fans, they love their sound, they love eachother.

I think that's what we all hope to achieve in life. But there are many different roads to get there, mine lies elsewhere.

Let's Talk About Your Mother...

I heard word (not the bird) of a book called 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother' about the 'chinese' way of raising children. To quote the blurb that appears on the back, front and inside covers of the copy I perused - 'This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising children than Western ones.'

And rather than reviewing a book I haven't read, I read bits of it, in store like Amy Chua's take on what the violing represents but nothing comprehensive. This article probably makes most of my critique redundant, but here is a run down of the impression I get:

The 'chinese' way of parenting is to obsessively push your child to succeed. Thus an A- is an unacceptable grade and you pull your kid out of school for extra violin practice, you never give your kids praise and you put them down and make sure they never accept that they are good enough.

Amy argues (perhaps... or some reviewer) that 'the results are hard to argue with' and my fear is that prospective idiot parents may actually accept that statement as somehow valid in some way.

It's this 'success' that is the crucial fallacy that makes me worry about imitators of the 'Chinese' way of parenting, or even societal approach. This relentless pushing of your child so they get into Yale and can play classical music in world class symphony orchestras is all easily unstuck by the simple fallacy that it ascribes a universal definition to success.

Such a definition does not exist, but 'high-context cultures' fall into the trap constantly. While it is true to say that 'rules exist for a reason' it is not true to say that those reasons are good ones. Pursuing academic success is fine, if our educational system was actually a good one, but it isn't. Up until post-graduate university studies it is almost entirely about assessment and has very little to do with knowledge.

Higher education is very vocationally specific, in the same way as secondary education is very focused on getting kids into university, university in turn is very focused on getting kids into salaried positions at large pre-existing firms.

Both these situations arise I feel worldwide because security is far more marketable than risk taking. My personal experience studying economics and finance is that a degree in it is almost the equivalent of being a 'certified fool' unless you read widely outside of the prescribed texts and remain skeptical of everything you are taught.

It's on the outskirts of academia you find invention, creation and progress. The individuals taking these risks may be professors themselves inside academia, but there theories don't make it onto the academic syllabus worldwide (behavioural economics being a case in point, your average graduate won't touch this emerging feild and will not even know they have been trained in Neo-classical economics, they will just think they have learned 'Economics')

The merits of the 'Chinese' tiger mother method sink or swim against academic results being a worhtwhile pursuit.

I don't think the goal is necessarily 'Chinese' in my experience the same parental concern manifests itself everywhere. Namely 'Medicine and Law are for winners, dentistry and accounting for losers' attitude. What is the attraction to Medicine for example? There are few highly influential doctors in global society, they are not kingmakers, innovators (apart from the obvious medical breakthroughs) they don't sit anywhere within the Forbes 500 rich list, they are rarely Times' Man of the Year and are relatively low profile compared to business school graduates, musicians, artists and scientists.

The answer is that all the other professions entail risk, whereas Medicine is attractive because it is the best compensated secure profession. People will always get sick, due to the maslownian heirarchy people make a priority out of getting better and are willing to pay to do so. Thus doctors will probably always lead a comfortable life relative to the average shmuck. By comparison, one musician can earn $40 million dollars in a year while vast numbers of muso's earn almost nothing from their calling and most pouring coffees for doctors.

The parenting role is almost irrelevant though because from the information provided in the preceeding paragraph it is impossible to determine who would be happiest.

I have sadly controversial views on parenting, they are as follows:

1. You don't have to live your childs life.

This means exactly what it says. Your child is the one that actually has to practice medicine or live on the streets, not you. Their experience is subjective and it is up to them to choose how they wish to experience life. If somebody blocked you from taking some kind of risk to make them feel better, eg. preventing you from going on holiday to South America because of kidnapping, it would feel like usurpation - and you would be right. Your career, and education are far more significant than a holiday so why should any parent be allowed to usurp their childs will on such a significant part of their lives.

2. You owe your life to your child, not the other way round.

This argument is often degraded as immature the 'I didn't choose to be born.' But I feel it is fundamentally valid. One way or another a parent chooses to have a child, even if it is their choice to continue to observe their own religious prejudices. There are viable ways to prevent and terminate pregnancy. If you choose to have a child, then you take responsibility for everything that comes with. You are bringing a sentient individual into the world, yyou have to look after that individual until they can support themselves. Society will step in because our community is awesome, but fundamentally a parent in having a child has committed their lives to the support and raising of that child that they may be whoever they wish to be and belong to themselves (until such a time as they choose to have a child). In return, the child owes you nothing, absolutely nothing. Their requitted love is a bonus, but they don't even have to turn up to your funeral. It's your job to win their love, not the reverse. (which pretty much entirely invalidates Tiger Mother method).

3. Yu encourage and enthuse your kid.

Under 1, we have established that parents don't have the right to usurp the risks their child is willing to take for their own personal comfort. Stepping beyond this, a parent has to, to the best of their ability actually create opportunities for their child to succeed at what they want to do. It's your job to find your kid a basketball team, get them music lessons or pull them out of school and find them a butchers apprenticeship. This is not pushing though, this is going with the flow. As the cracked.com article pointed out whoever heard of a kid giving up drawing when their parent said their first crappy offerings were good.

4. You teach choice and responsibility.

Which you can't do if you don't accept number 2. That would be hypocritical. This though is the basic ingredient for making an individual not a dick, and thus a functioning member of a community. It is a simple repeatable phrase 'well that was your choice, you have to take responsibility for the consequences.' Much bad parenting is trying to insulate kids from the consequences of their decisions. They are protected from failure. An inability to accept responsibility for ones position in life is the key shaper of embittered individuals, they blame the world for their problems. My own mother for example has carried the belief that her family growing up were miserable because they were poor, it occured to me much later (if not her) that perhaps they were poor because they were miserable. Once again it is actually impossible to tell on the surface who is happier between a paraplegic and a lottery winner.

5. Happiness is the goal.

On the surface having an academically successful kid that can play an unpopular* style of music profficiently seems preferable to raising a child that has a drug addiction and no direction in life. However, if I had to bet on one actually finding the motivation to achieve happiness by implementing lifestyle changes it would be the latter.
Regardless this isn't a bogus dilemma, there is success in a predefined regimented context (like academia, and prescriptive genres of music) and their is success in reality. You don't even have to create the iPod to be a success. You just have to be happy, happiness is determined by genetics, parenting till around the age of 6 and achievement of short term goals (regardless of actual context). The first two an individual can do nothing about. Unless you are a parent you can do something about another individuals happiness. I imagine it takes collossal discipline to actually live the words 'I just want you to be happy' because vested interest crops up all the time. But that's the goal, parents should try and live it.

But the last thing I will say on Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, apart from being pretty much the antithesis of good parenting from my own prejudice, is that on a personal level I found it reassuring. I have a prejudice against a totalitarian government responsible for decades of widespread misery rising up in the world. The emerging China myth though I feel will amount to very little. High context cultures are great when it comes to playing catch-up on a pre-defined path of success, as Japan did up until the 80's. But when it takes time to take the lead that's where you need the entreprenuers, the risk takers, the dreamers and these are not produced by blind dedication to a predefined path. China thus far has proved less innovative than Japan that at least produced the Walkman and the Nintendo before its bubble burst.

*I don't mean to diss classical music, but it is in most places in the world sustained by government funding because it cannot attract audiences willing to pay the monies that would make it viable as a private sector industry. I have enjoyed classical music, at free concerts put on by funded institutions, government bodies or long dead benefactors. By contrast I have often paid $80 or more to see public school drop outs from Brooklyn rock a concert hall and I am almost never alone at these events.

Yet Even More Epiphanies

I had the realisation that you help nobody when you have a relationship based on guilt. Or guilt as a motivator. Kind of like when a relationship hits that 'trying to make it work' stage, and its just awful. You can't fake love or whatever.

In a semi related matter I've been using youtube to listen to songs I don't have. One thing I would do if I was supreme overlord of the world is just get rid of youtube comments. Watching Peeping Tom's live performances, the sicophantic comments make me throw up a little in my mouth:

'...as I Mike Patton fan I'm still objective, because that's what he asks from his fans.' n shit. And these are the comments that agree with me. So if people who share my viewpoint make me sick, I feel really we should get rid of it completely.

It's kind of like the Southpark episode where Jim goes undercover into the Ku Klux Klan and convinces them that because everybody hates them, they should support the flag change. Sometime it's nice to be backed up, but othertimes it's a liability to be backed up by somebody negative.

It's the negativity I am done with, tired of it. On friday I wrote a post about a character trait I found ugly, and a few hours later I deleted it. This reaction is good but not as good as not having spent my time writing something negative in the first place.

There are two dogs fighting in all of us, one called 'hate' and one called 'love' and do you know which dog wins that fight? The one you feed the most.

That is the crux of it all, I am done feeding my hate, my sister told me off for railing against hipsters and their apathetic music, and she's right. I couldn't handle being mainstream and current fashions remove most men from competing in my niche, so really I should feed the positive of the hipster situation.

So too, with any situation that fosters negativity, I am just going to avoid them as positively as I can. I know there are times when it is appropriate to bitch and moan and complain. There are times where conflict is constructive, but for now I'm just going to roll with being positive, till my love dog is morbidly obese - oh, that sounds like a disgusting euphamism.

Fake it till you make it.

Last week I hugged 7 people. This week I hugged 22. Why the fuck do I know how many people I've hugged in the last fortnight?

I don't want to go into the specifics, but basically I realised I'm a closed person. My body language is closed, and there are only two people in the world I actually let into an intimate space on a regular basis.

And if you are thinking 'mum and dad' you are wrong, they are Shona and Bryce, the two people I have actually let get close to me over the years. Thus they actually don't count in my hug counts.

I've been confident with handshaking since I was eight years old. Janice has repeated the story to me many a time of shopping at Wendoree village and seeing me walk off and shake hands with this chubby kid, talk like we were about to declare war on some Balkan state, shake hands and walk away. That chubby kid was Bryce.

I have no fear of public speaking, I will make a speech off the top of my head, I can approach a burning car with no fear as to my personal safety, but I can't let people get close to me. I don't know why, I've probably learned bad insecure body language from some role model along the way.

I have always fucked up the kiss hello, I cross my arms when talking to people, I keep a distance, I turn my shoulder when sitting next to somebody to erect a barrier. I notice these things consciously now. Most of my life I just did them unconsciously.

Now I am consciously hugging people. And it's:

1. Awkward.
2. Pleasant.
3. Surprisingly well accepted.
4. Informative.

I'm bad at it. Really bad, blundering, blunt, shit, bad. Having said that, behavioural change is never easy. I'm far too conscious of the whole process, I don't really know what constitutes a good hug (surely I cant be hugging everyone like they're my girlfriend).

But seriously if I had told myself that I could even hug 22 people in 7 days a month ago I would have balked at such an inconcievably large number. I still can't believe I did. That's like 3 hugs a day. Previously my max would have been 3 hugs a month and that would include Bryce and Shona.

Attitudes are often taken to shape behaviours, but behaviours in fact often shape our attitudes. Thus I am changing my behaviour pattern. I hope to get better at just opening up, opening up my body language in the same way this blog opened up my thought processes for others to go through at their leisure. Maybe I'll never be one of those people that others feel they can just walk right into a hug, but maybe, maybe I will.

First Impressions last because so few of us bother to ever change.

So my head is still at Good Vibes which is a good place for it to be. Towards the end of the evening, dressed as some kind of Celtic Eskimo with Viennese sausage in hand (not a euphamism) I wandered across some lawn and some pavement into the laser lighting show of Faithless.

Something about electronic music and flashing lights and the colour blue stimulates the brain and though I was not tripping on any drugs (as per always) I found myself going on a journey of emotion and possibility that felt a positive shade of blue.

The title of this post was one of the repetitive hooks of a song in Faithless' set which if memory serves me correctly was actually coloured green not blue but it needless to say went 'How can I change the world if I can't even change myself ?' and thanks to the miracle of Google I was able to find out the song was called Salvae Mea, which according to the miracle of Wikipedia means 'Save My'.

Anyway, Faithless push the positivity they don't promote no junk, but I found this song quite positive. Thanks to it's repetitiveness its message was easy to absorb. Badu also did a prolonged 'Believe In Yourself' but the freestyling vocal style made it relatively harder to absorb. Plus you'd be all like 'this isn't techno, why's she all repeating herself?' know what I'm saying?

No.

Okay so Faithless were saying 'How can I change the world if I can't even change myself ?' and here's the thing. I can change myself. I'm capable of change. Sure there is some essence that makes me, me. Plus peeps including myself tend to misremember things. NNT points out that often an actors 'skill' or 'talent' or 'genius' is retrospectively applied to their careers AFTER they win an Oscar. We forget that we never really noticed them before. Or we assume that other people did.

Anyway, I can make a jump shot, like shoot overhead in basketball, this is just one tangible way I have changed. That is reversing a life long bad habit of shooting from the hip. An easier to block underarm shot that I always did (and I am told looks particularly ungraceful).

I am also much better at listening than I was 5 years ago, when I didn't listen to anybody at all. Everything I knew about anyone I did through observing and assuming. I was taught the secret by Shona, that in fact everybody is kind of fascinating if you can just listen to them, look for them. I'm still a terrible listener, but I am 1000 times better than I was.

To answer Faithless' question though (which was rhetorical I know) I can change the world around me by changing myself, a part of our environment is me. I think though that the very wording of the question alludes to responsibility I am reminded of the Maturity Goats: The one specifically in the upper left looking at the clouds, that 'Blames Self for World' is the contrasting goat to the red one with back to the clouds 'Blames World for Problems'.

The very question 'How can I change the world?' is to suggest we are in control of the world, that it can be changed by 'I'*. It is already assuming that we are not a victim. That if the world doesn't suit us we can go out there and change it. How empowering. To ackowledge that we can change ourselves though is most empowering.

I don't mean in the Little Mermaid sense, where you make sacrifices for cosmetic changes in order to get a guy, but in Emporers New Groove sense where you transform yourself into a better human being and grow for your own sake.

And like a Llama crossing the jungle, change isn't easy or even pleasent, but if you can make yourself more capable, more versatile it pays off, peeps will notice it eventually and you don't have to be saddled with some first impression. You can make a second impression if you are capable of change.

*'I' kind of looks like a seal looking at me.

Mastery

So yesterday I was at Good Vibes, saw some amazing shit that turns my brain to shit. Nas and Damien Marley and some guy who constantly twirled the Ethiopian Flag, a surprisingly enjoyable Koolism, A post apocalyptic dance party, a trippy spirutual journey into the colour blue with Faithless and the complete kitchen drumkit but none really compared to the incomparable Erykah Badu.

Why and how? She has mastery, like absolute mastery of what she does, it translates into this impossible sense of control over everything the whole music, not just her vocals but the band, the stage, the fans... in control. Just literally owns it.

Like I wrote about the importance of the audience in a performance but she just orchestrated the whole thing, just shit like 'okay I'm tired of your shit' blah blah blah I'd seed De La Soul on Friday Night, and MCs are really MCs they talk far more than when you see a rock band (maybe not a folk band though) but Badu puts De La to shame, made all the 'put your hands in the air' stuff seem really laboured and tired.

Mastery owns, I find it hard to articulate, but somebody who has mastered something owns it, their personality comes through. I was always struck with her studio albums how conversational and personal Badu's tracks are. Like you feel like you are sitting in her kitchen while she is just singing to you. I feel I know what it is like to be her kid getting lullabys sung or whatever.

Sooooooooooo really I shouldn't have been surprised that this is amplified in the live experience. Here's a clip that may or may not convey to you what the fuck I am talking about:



Now I say it's incomparable but I would compare Badu for my white male friends to seeing Mike Patton. Mike Patton has completely different yet similar vocal mastery, this too reminds me of some quote by somebody about NBA greats 'all this talk of what position a player plays, whether they are point guard, power forward, center. You have people like Barkley who was supposedly a power forward but stepped back and drained threes. You had Magic who was tall enough to play center and ran the point... in the end the truly great players don't play a position, they play basketball.' Patton is for my black female friends a vocalist ostensibly, but he can sing death metal style, opera, soul, beat box, rap etc. he is at the very least 6 vocalists in one. He has that kind of freedom, Badu and Patton don't just sing, they make music.

Patton has that presence too, given his cultish following yet broad reaching tentacles into the musical industry (a musicians' musician?) you see him playing to crowds who have no fucking idea who he is, particularly since in the US Faith No More are regarded as one hit wonders. (But what a hit) instead of produces of 4 five-star completely different albums.

He has that same undeniable personal presence in what he does. Mike Patton sounds like Mike Patton, Erykah Badu sounds like Erykah Badu. At the Peeping Tom concert which I did devotionally drag my feet along to because I thought it might be my only chance to see Patton, it fucking owned. I was not expecting to honestly enjoy the concert that much. The thing was though that I was directly behind some cocktard who did nothing all concert but take photos and spit on Mike Patton.

To give an example of Patton's unique and undeniable stage presence he got fucked off with this guy and told him to try and spit on his tongue, stuck it out and then the guy hocked like 7 loogies at Patton's face and Patton just stood there tongue out taking it.

So yes, Patton's a freak but he does have that complete mastery of what he does, a looseness and freedom that says you could throw anything at him and he will just do his thing. Here is a video of Peeping Tom to illustrate his stage presence.


So what is mastery, I actually suspect its the point where you know yourself so well that you can move freely, Badu has lyrics in some song that said 'I have the weight of the world on my shoulder' (sorry it's really hard to try and recall specifics of a live audio experience) but on the contrary she comes across as incredibly light and loose, but large, very large. The kind of large that bridges distances and makes them feel like they are in your face.

There's vocalists that are amazing like Maynard of Tool, they have range, expression and emotion, they have risen to near perfection of a tightly defined performance. There are in your high-school class, your workplace, your family people who can sing and carry a tune and hit desired pitches better than you ever will, but mastery is something different, it's where all the restraints, preconceptions and expectations fall away and whatever happens just don't matter. You are in control.

At the very start of her performance Badu spilled a thermos of tea (I assume) that ran down her jacket and her leg in an incident that I imagine would send one of the costume change-as-performance pop divas into an irretreivable tail spin. She didn't even shrug it off, it was like it just happened and it didn't matter.

I'm in a real Musashi frame of mind at the moment but I thinks this captures Musashi's 'heiho' concept that is near and dear to my heart, and I think this mastery, this looseness is what Takehiko tries to convey in the image below:


That indefinable quality, I hope I can get there with my drawing one day.

Do.

I nabbed a lift from my sis in the rain last night, we are very similar. I'm taller and generally more awesome than she is, but otherwise Identical.

One thing we agree on is that whilst knowing a problem is good, it isn't everything.

Faith No More's 'Last Cup of Sorrow' contains the line 'It won't begin until you make an end. Until you know the how the why and the when.' or something. And it's true, conducting autopsies is productive. Epiphanies are valuable.

But there's a line. There's a line in which case self psycho analysis is productive and on the otherside it is just self indulgent bullshit.

That is, you meet peeps that have spent years in therepy going over the same old shite, getting presumably deeper understandings of their probs. And some problems are relentless and unending, like addiction. And better to be addicted to therepy than alcohol etc.

The line though is a fuzzy and fast moving piece of razor wire you have to jump over. You can pull apart your brain for ever but eventually that line needs to be crossed into the light.

The line is 'what are you going to do?'

For example. I am an introvert. I drag my feet to parties, I shy away from new people and I feel exhausted after meeting them.

On the bad side of the line, this sort of knowledge is employed as an excuse to not go to parties, to continue to shy away from new people and insist that people simply 'understand your way.'

On the good side of the line you say 'I gotta bring the fucking effort' and you go to those parties, you ask questions of new peeps and you bring the enthusiasm to engage.

This doing shit revolutionised my life about 5 years ago.

My mentor Rod let me in the secret when I was complaining that not enough people thought about 'why?' in their lives, and that 'why?' was an exciting question. He corrected me and said 'why isn't nearly so exciting as 'how?' you wanna see a group engaged you ask them 'how?'''''''''''

After the pinata therapy I had an epiphany, I can't go into the details, but let's just say I have a specific irrational fear that I didn't understand and my desire to be rid of it lead to it undermining my confidence in all areas and drawing me ever downwards into a negative frame of mind.

Specifically I was afraid of success, my mind wouldn't accept it and would play devils advocate at pretty much every positive development. Without knowing whether I actually would succeed or not, I simply didn't want to take control of it and my solution was to try and simply be so awesome that success would be handed to me, sort of like Lebron has been handed everything in life.

Some people get lucky and this happens. I am kind of glad it didn't though, I feel understanding my fear has made it solidify into a scab in my mind and now I can dance around it.

What do I do? Stop praying for rescue. Stop letting it get into every aspect of my life and stop letting it set unrealistic and unachievable benchmarks that only serve to demotivate me. That and calm the fuck down.

Infact my epiphany was nothing new, but more the revelation that this old fear was still hanging around and I'd forgotten about it. It's kind of a shame it tripped me up, but these things happen. I'm just glad I know what to do now. I know which corner to fucking put that fear in.

Now all I need to do is dance.

You Never Get Better At Hurting

I'll be honest with you blog, right now I'm hurting. Having an episode, I am down and out except a lot of people love me. This I know.

In a rare move for me I decided to treat my downness with alcohol and socialising instead of my usual counciling and introspection. This does provide momentary relief, but I find myself fearing the alone time which is truly frightening for an introvert. I feel anxious and disconnected, I check my email too often, my facebook too often and I eat and sleep too little.

Yesterday I got around to sleeping, I attempted to try and get a weeks worth of sleep in a night. I napped in the afternoon after work and woke up feeling drunk and disoriented. I stayed up to do some drawings I'd promised people which is good and helps me feel better that I am doing something good for other people.

But really you can get better at forcing yourself through the motions, but nothing, nothing stops hurt from hurting.

And I hurt myself. I lie in a bed of my own making and am amazed at how poorly prepared I am for the fallout. I just feel like a fuckup, a fucked up, fuck up nobtard douchebag.

Then you have to force yourself into the positive self talk, which a lack-there-of is what got myself into this mess, and my gameplan seems to have involved severly handicapping myself in this regard.

But I know enough of the motions, enough of the experience of these funks to force myself to do these things. To be proud of myself. To make myself shave and brush my teeth every day, make myself eat, make myself go to bed, make myself exercise, smile, turn up to work... and all these things work.

I feel better until my body decides to wake me at 5 am to contemplate my hurting. And it goes on, what is ridiculous is that this is the worst I've felt since Claire left me but with the one difference of back then I cried all the time.

Now I can't. Because I'm eating, sleeping, shaving, brushing my teeth, exercising, working, perservering.

I almost think what I need is to be suspended from a tree and immobilised to swing freely in a breeze and just stay there for a week or two so I can just hurt and not try and manage it all.

Just feel.

And I don't mean hanging by the neck but rather Takuan's treatment of Musashi in Vagabond depicted below:



I'm human, I fuck up, I hurt, I feel the full spectrum of emotions despite me having a different spectrum of experiences. My rational mind overreacts perhaps but my emotional state just is, I don't control it, I just feel it.

And right now I feel bad. And it never gets easier.

Best Response Ever:

After reading this in my Google Reader stream I knew I had to share it.

Read it, it doesn't take long.

Now I just want to say, the guy is a total fucking douchebag, nobody in the world is going to look at Dan Hipp's work and say 'that must be Mike Mignola/Ed McGuinness/Ben Caldwell' which tells you he has his own style. They may see the influences, those influences may be entirely coincidental.

They may be coincidenta, because the artist that actually inspired and informed and influenced your style may in turn have been influenced by somebody else.

Scratch that they DEFINATELY were inspired by somebody else. Why? Because you can't be an artist or even a lay pen operator without being exposed and having positive reactions to art in life.

The highest form of flattery is imitation, and aside from tracing faithful reproductions you are never going to succeed at perfect imitation.

Two of my favorite artists - Humberto Ramos and Francesco Herrera are actually a mentor-protege pair. Ramos taught Francesco since he was 16, you could superficially confuse the two as having the same 'style' but when you look closely there is significant differences in their approach to drawing.

So douches need to quit hating, because really they are saying that Picaso's cubist works are a travesty because he totally stole his 'style' from African masks. That the Renaissance works should be burned and crushed to gravel because they were inspired by Greek Classicism.

Get your hand off it douches and embrace the fact that there is a profundity of great art being produced out there. Peeps will pay $400 for a generic necklace but somehow it is a crime for a magazine to pay somebody for a hand made and unique piece of art?

Google Reader

Yesterday morning I had never heard of google reader, today I am subscribed to approx 263 art blogs with 369 new pieces I have not yet checked out. I was put onto it by Skottie Young, artist extraodinaire in the comic world.

Who had this to say:

It's very easy to get lost in all the negative blah blah that goes on around the net and in the world of comics and entertainment. You know, "This books sucks" "This book is GOING to suck" "Company A are just a bunch of Greedy F's and Company B is ruining my childhood" "This press release is so dumb" "Artist X is no good" blah blah blah. You've seen it, I've seen it. If you're not careful, it's easy to get sucked in and fight the battles that will never find a winner.

One of the things that keep me on a constant positive high is the daily art rush I get from checking my Google Reader Blog Subscriptions. Every time I find a new artists blog, I copy the address and drop it into my subscription list. Over the last few years, I've compiled a list of 350+ blogs and it's growing every day. When I get into the office each morning, the first stop I make is Google Reader and I usually have bout 50 updates. That's at LEAST 50 pieces of art that kick starts my day and keeps me in a great mood. It inspires me to no end.

He then lists all the artblogs he has painstakingly collected over who knows how long.

This is a wonderful thing he has done. It is possibly the nicest thing anyone has done for me this year. (last year was all the charity donations, which will be hard to beat ever). The first paragraph I quoted above, I could relate to coincidently from something I saw just the other day.

I like Skottie because he's in the cartoony school of artists working in comics right now. Humberto Ramos though is my hero. I was looking at a forum discussion of his run on Spider Man 'Big Time' story arc and couldn't believe these Joe-nobodies paying him out.

Sure I think Ramos' artwork is gorgeous and others prefer Jim Lee or something, they are entitled to their opinion. But it's amazing how things change for the pro's.
Currently (well as of yesterday's post no longer currently) I tend to pay out my artwork and the friends/fans build me up. It seems that reverses at some point, perplexingly when you become really good, suddenly you need to believe in your own abilities to survive because the vast array of 'fans' out there are overwhelmingly negative.

I'm definitely guilty myself, I'd readily criticise Tool's '10,000 days' album myself even though in reality it is better than any music I will ever produce in my lifetime ever. (It to me was just not different enough to Lateralus). And I always assumed that Tool would never care about the opinions of Joe-Nobody like me.

But the internet is a funny thing, it makes the army of nobodies that populate fandom out there into a huge visable mass. A visable mass of haters. I'm going to endeavor to no longer participate in this mass, because as I figure most peeps who create stuff are probably their own harshest critics anyway and they just don't need to be told what is wrong.

The second paragraph was a paradime shift for me. One would think that getting daily reminders that there are thousands of great artists out there is a depressing reality of how hard it will be for any newbie artist to stand up and be counted. But on the contrary, drawing is so lonely, so terribly lonely that waking up and being able to tap into and see so many people creating such beautiful/perverse/wonderful imagary every day has the exact same effect that Skottie described - It puts me in a great mood and motivates me to work harder.

Thus I salute you Skottie Young, and thank you. This is a great idea, a great, free idea.

In The Gallary

On a sad day late last year I walked past a poster in RMIT and it spoke to me. It was 'Toy to the World' a charity event calling for artists to paint these Popobe bears (vinyl statuettes) for a charity auction with all proceeds going to the Victorian Aids Council.

Because I was so sad that day, I decided to throw myself at my art and volunteered to do it, to paint a bear.

What I didn't anticipate was that painting a small bear statue thing would be one of the most agonizing and depressing lessons in humility ever. I was happy with my design, which was done on paper. But I wasn't happy when it came to painting it.

I felt my brush strokes were too scratchy, the layers uneven, the lines ragged, the colour palette horrible.

The bear stared at me, and I wanted to burst into tears constantly. I kept wondering if I could just throw in the towell and simply never speak to the event organisers ever again.

I've always been particular about commitments though, and I recollected my wits.

The problem was that I had thrown myself into a medium with which I was completely unfamiliar. I'd never painted on vinyl, I hadn't painted with a brush for ten years, I'd never painted onto a 3 dimensional surface.

I learned enough fucking it up though to decide that if I just had one familiar element I could make it work.

I switched to copic marker, and drew on all the linework instead.

What I finished with I felt was a sufficiently rescued piece and only two days past the deadline. It was satisfactorily adequate in my view.

I dropped it off and resolved to never think about it again.

Which I succeeded at for a while because I forgot to roster off work for the exhibition opening.

Yesterday I snuck into the gallery and slunk up the back with a plan to shamefully bid on my own bear to save face and make sure I hadn't wasted the sponsors donated materials. I hadn't seen my bear in two months.

When I saw it it wasn't as bad as I remembered. It actually looked quite good. I felt better, I went to go fill out the minimum bid on it (Item #034) and discovered it had already been bid up to more than I could afford ($50). Suddenly I was filled with a warm glowing feeling and it changed my whole day from terrible to awesome.

Here is what I've learned, at some point you have to accept that you are good at art. Because the alternative means that people who like your art don't know what they like.

Somebody likes my piece and I needed them to show me that, for me to like it too.

I am not going to beat myself up anymore. I am tough enough, and possibly damaged. I am just going to do art and hope it can find its fans. I will do it because I love it. Nothing more.

The Year that Began on New Years

I was all class. I ended 2011 with a visit to the Nazari's where I indelicately ate a peach and talked about school with the kids. I cycled to a sophisticated gathering in Moonee Ponds, in an apartment building where the hosts wore kimono's. Then I made with the economics talk at my final destination with a media type from Broken Hill talking about the inherant risks of property and irrationality of the market.

I felt dizzy, like I'd been standing too long and I crossed the living room into the study where I discovered the air conditioner. And that at some point before midnight I'd managed to get drunk somehow, probably the plastic pineapples full of cocktails I'd been drinking.

Anyway I say I'd walked into the study where the airconditioner was, but I kind of walked into a chapter out of Catch-22. Chapter 16 my favorite chapter.

I don't even recall how it started, or whether I or somebody started it, but suddenly I was surrounded by Italians. Like Italians from Italy. And here's what I don't know who or how started it, but suddenly I was defending my accent.

This happens to me a lot. More frequently than I ever anticipated. It never happened to me in Ballarat, but afterwards, all the time. Every third person I meet asks me about my American accent.

I had learned to brush it off with my standard line 'I just watch too much television' but this wasn't washing over. Then the bella donna at the back of the room started attacking me over US foreign policy. I was like 'I grew up in Ballarat'

For some reason drinking unlocks the language center of my brain, and I started pulling out all (both) my italian phrases. I was still classy enough at this stage to not do the 'ciao bella posso di conocierti?' (I can't spell italian, but it's like "Hey beautiful, can I get to know you?') then again, now that I think about it I'm not sure I didn't.

That would explain her wonderful hostility. I am so much more comfortable when people give me a hard time than when people are nice and friendly. That's the fucked up way I roll.

So when I produced every piece of ID I had in my wallet to try and prove my nationality, I was having a delightful time. Things were either going really well or more likely incredibly poorly, when suddenly little Italy left.

I lacked the class to sit stationary feeling sorry for myself, and managed to ask the girl how I would ever find her again. Once again, I couldn't detect whether they were being coy or hostile, when they were like 'facebook, email blah blah blah.' something quite literally like that without any actual information.

Anyway, I was quite literally (yes, this is how classy I am) going 'ooooooooohhhhhhhh' as I turned around and stopped and got straight into another conversation. In hindsight, I was flirting with self-depreciating humour, that in that setting was in fact entirely deserved. I was a drunken douche. In face saving further hindsight, I'm pretty sure that girl just enjoyed the flirting and flattery, and had no actual interest in me from the outset.

I bought pizza, at some point after asking my host to 'surprise me' and handing my wallet around far too often to not be lucky to still have it. (probably everyone realised I had nothing in it worth taking). I recall my self depreciating humour just digging me into a hole where I literally crushed my own esteem. Then waking up at my tram stop and getting in home somehow miraculously.

I also remember typing 'predictive' into a text message and being amazed at the miracle of predictive text and then writing a whole bunch of random words and sending it. I'd really like to know what was in that text message.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Like Catch-22 I ended up home alone like Yossarian. But I realised, that unlike Yossarian, I just can't close.

This was a horrifying revelation for me. And coincidently it became my new years resolution.

You see, I'm fairly predictable, my motivation is simple... I admitted this for the first time yesterday, and now I'm kind of horrified that its how I've been living.

My motivation is: I don't care about me, I am here to be used up. I just care about other people. I'm quite really, emotionally masochistic.

I've gotten this way, because it was easy, and it was better than where I came from, which was where I simply didn't care about anybody. And I don't know how I got there.

So I've decided to change. Which was easy, doing it is harder. I am naturally a back foot player. Better in defence than attack.

I've always outsourced my support. Other people support me, and I generally neglect myself. My idea of supporting myself is just pushing myself harder to be more awesome.

I do think I'm pretty awesome, I just never tell this to myself. I'm always just 'I'm not good enough, I'm not ready.' I'm used to being in other peeps corner, never my own.

I think I'm a good supporter. I could use my own support. So this is what I'm trying to change. My self talk and everything. It's hard I have a lot of habits to break.

But I can see the progress, not just on that front but every thing I do. I'm in a positive place acting like its a shithole. Like an Olsen Twin or something.

Ya basta! It's time for me to start acting like I am who I want to be. I'm a long way there already. That's how my year began.

I never thought I'd say this but, thankyou alcohol.

On Economics

As my economics degree draws to a close (I have one semester left, mostly finance subjects) I have come to the weary conclusion that economics as it stands is little better, if not worse than theology.

The quotation that has shattered my thinking on economics is this:

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men, how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. ~ Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit.

When I embarked on this second degree, Bryce asked me why the fuck I was doing it when I should be holed up in a room somewhere drawing. A very valid question. Bryce knows I have a passion for drawing, but do I have a passion for economics? Finance?

The answer is yes, but not of the same variety. This quote by Keynes is a well worn one but worth repeating:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. ~ John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money.

The sentiments expressed are exactly why I'm passionate about economics and it's current and continuing malpractice. But while Keynes' quote blew my mind sometime back in year 11 when I first discovered this incisive and observative thinker, Hayek is new to me and the effect on my thinking probably more profound.

He makes drawing the line between economics as religion vs science easy. It reminds me of a book I picked up in a Dusseldorf bookstore called 'irreligious' in the Dawkin's fueld athiest boom of several years ago.

There I came across a particular stunning explanation/argument against 'Intelligent Design' it pointed out that anyobody (capable of picking up that book in a bookstore) could in all likelihood walk down the street and into a shoestore and find a shoe that fits their feet, that they can purchase and walk out of the store with. Same goes for Bras, meals and any other of the complex goods and services readily available to anybody with money in our global economics system.

Does this mean some omniscient being had prior knowledge of my shoe size and material demands and thus 'designed' by some super intelligence? No, the incredibly complex system that produces goods 'for us' is largely blind to our existence. Modern retail has EVOLVED through trial and error, the effecient business practices win out over ineffeciencies and suplant them totally. They are operating on an accellerated evolution to biology because successful business practices can be imitated (loyalty programs, Just-In-Time manufacturing etc.)

The blinding flash of obviousness that Hayek articulates so well, is that economies just like the extreme diversity of life on planet earth is not designed. If you took away the economists, there would still be an economy.

To stick with the analogy for now, it is my belief that morality is something evolved. Many philosophers have struggled over centuries (milennia) to explain our moral system, and yet the field of biology (particularly condensed into 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins) provides a far simpler and elegant and satisfying explanation of human moral behaviour. Without exploding the details everyone struggles to explain why consequentialist moral codes only work some of the time/in some situations (Utilitarianism, Machiavellianism) and other times it seems right to be Absolutist (Kant's Deontological Ethics - eg. even if it causes more hurt, you should tell the truth).

Biology says that different genes dictate different behaviours, and the ones that tend to survive certain situations. The implications of this is that there may be no 'right thing to do' or 'right way to live' but infact only a bunch of different right things to do, in different situations.

It is I feel the conceit of most religions to have very specific ways to do the right thing in all circumstances and in the act of subscribing to a particular belief system you can actually circumvent your intuitive moral judgement.

So too it is the Fatal conceit to think we can somehow design a perfect economic system. Much like advertising and it's regulators, the jungle of the market produces behaviours that I feel will always outpace regulation.

Particularly in financial markets the 'sophistication' of financial products (like Collaterised Debt Obligations) is evolving faster than the regulations that govern them.

What then is the role of economics?

Not whatever it currently is. I feel regulation should be on the general rather than the specific but I wouldn't go as far as Hayek to poo-poo say Stimulus in all situations etc.

Robert Schiller, a fan of Keynes points out one problem with free markets and probably the best case for regulation and government intervention in the markets:

'The market is incredibly effecient at producing goods wanted by consumers. The problem being that if the market demands snake oil, it will very efficiently produce snake oil.'

Yes that argument employed by totalitarians everywhere 'people need to be protected from themselves'

Economics as practiced is incredibly complex and suffers ironically from a lack of 'Japaneseness' (If you don't know why this is ironic, look at Japan's economic performance since 1990). That is as a science it lacks the discipline of quality control. Or as Toyota and Honda practice it: Total Quality Management.

Economics is a soft science. Throw out the mathematic modelling and aggregates. We are modelling human behaviour, subject to emotion AND rationality. Take for example 'profit maximising behaviour' one of the central assumptions of (Neo) Classical economists. They say that profits are maximised when Marginal Cost is equal to Marginal Revenue (a further increase in production will not yeild a subsequent increase in revenue). In practice most (if not every) firm cannot know at any point in time that is useful what their marginal cost and marginal revenue is. Most do not price based on economic modelling either, deriving demand curves etc. They use a 'cost-plus-mark-up' approach.

Much of economic modelling that I have learned is of no use whatsoever in understanding how any given business does (or even should) operate.

But observations and tests of human behaviour even in a soft science can be derived from controlled and replicable experiments. Not backfitting mathematics to historical data.

I would dedicate economics as attempting to overcome shortsighted behaviour. Keynes pointed out in the long run we are all dead. I believe the role of economics, beyond Hayek's demonstration of how little we understand is to make that long run as long run as possible.

Economics currently assumes that personal material enrichment makes you happy even though other sciences far more respectable than economics have proven time and again it doesn't. It also doesn't look forward, the GDP maximising model is expressely short term. We FIGHT it to make any provision for the future right now.

Economics needs to be the exact opposite of this. Not to impoverish people but to make sure our material wealth/abundance/opportunity is the maximum in the future. That is it needs to intervene where we cannot see past the short term.

I look at economists of little to no influence in current thinking like Henry George, who illustrates a good example of long term economic regulation - that is using resources as your tax base rather than productive income/wages. This makes it hard to monopolize a resource without productively using it.

It would have made Rockefeller's wealth impossible, it prevents bubbles (or punishes the foolhardy speculators for engaging in speculation) and basically protects people from being suckered into cycles of illusory reward and catastrophic ruin.

But whatever they are teaching in school, has one and one use only - to be informed of the disinformation current economists consider themselves informed by. To give Mark Twain the final word:

'Never let your schooling interfere with your education.'

There's Something About Sasuke

Naruto is the number one selling comic title in Japan and the US, ah Japanese comic that is. I'm not sure if DC and Marvel still outsell Japanese comics.

Japanese comics and western comics have a lot in common anyway, they are 90% crap, and dominated (like anything else) by 2% of the comics produced commanding a majority of sales. These in turn are usually from a genre that dominates. In western comics it's superheroes and in Japan it is the young boys adventure epic.

Both are charecterised by the proven formula archetypes. You have Batman and Daredevil, the same dark anti-hero with their emotional disfunctions, and then you have 'Kid Hungry' the pure of heart young boy who can never stop eating and sticks up for the weak in Japan.

I love One Piece, and am indifferent to Naruto. I have started reading it again recently mainly because 8 months or so had passed since I last got bored with it.

I got bored with Naruto because of Sasuke, somewhat childishly, Shuonen jump runs these reader polls to see who the most popular character in a series is. These would be more meaningful in something like Batman where the same rogues gallery has been rolling around for over 60 years, but alas it is a staple of the ongoing Japanese comic publication.

Where One Piece (same genre as Naruto, or at least same archetypes) has Monkey D Luffy the protagonist regularly coming in at Number 1, Naruto is almost constantly beaten out by Sasuke his ultimate nemisis.

I can see why Sasuke is popular, he is like Batman but if you even thought it possible even more one dimensional. Sasuke is the reason I routinely get bored by Naruto. He is just a plain boring fucking character. I suspect somehow to the majority of Shonen readers, he is somehow cool. He never says much, has little motivations and what little he possesses are not particularly inspiring. But he is A) strong and B) cool (in the Japanese sense) that is he has the haircut of a Japanese rockstar and is tall, where the protagonist is like this ugly ranga kid.

Sasuke illustrates I feel one of the chief problems that faces anybody creating anything - what is popular is not necessarily what is good.

How to illustrate this, say you have a hero, and you have a villain and the villain is in a building. You have two ways to resolve this conflict.

The first way is to have the hero walk into the building and confront the villain, talking it out and through feint and counterfeint large themes emerge, drama is created and the reader can reflect on the human condition while being surprised. The reader identifies with both characters, sympathises with the villain and ponders the dilemma and how it can be resolved and whether there truly is good or evil, or justice. Then the resolution comes about in a surprising way that makes you think about it for hours.

The second way is for the hero to announce he has a new special attack, a level 3 daidenkiron which he summons up and bystanders say things like 'unbelievable!' and 'my god, it's power level 30,000!' and then they blow up the building with the villain in it.

The second way to an unsofisticated audience (the majority) is far more popular, and requires almost no imagination, tact or skill to pull off. This was a large part of my problem with Dragonball Z and also why I never could get in to world of warcraft.

The process was as simple as it was appealing, you establish a villain as powerful by giving them some number that seemed high (like pinball scores) eg, a 'Battle Level of 10,000' as was used in early Dragonball. Then you have somebody rated at 3,000 to battle them. After struggling for a bit they find some new inner power and get re-evaluated at 20,000 and they beat the villain.

Dragonball had some merits, largely in it's lecherous humour which I don't feel is enough to elevate it to the classic it is. It inspired One Piece though which is one of the best comics out there at the moment so it's hard to begrudge.

World of Warcraft though demonstrates this same popular but ultimately unimaginative dilemma: You level up your character to be more powerful and equip it with objects. On one level this requires a bunch of diverse and fully realised details including rare items and shit that you have to spend hours aquiring to great enjoyment by WoW's loyal subscribers. But on a lower level, what is happening in all these battles is a bunch of numbers are being thrown around. Bigger numbers win, smaller numbers lose and no matter what the details are it is as simple as that.

Perhaps though there is a Sasuke of restaurants, worldwide the most popular restaurant is McDonalds. It makes a lot of money, and is enjoyed by millions worldwide. But then there's people who go for years slaving away to create restaurants like Noma in Denmark, Heston's 'The Fat Duck' in the UK. These are one hopes labors of love, requiring tremendous effort and collosal risk to make a small fortune as a 'celebrity' chef. (plus Heston has to routinely feed a pack of douchebags a 'feast' and they don't even pay to maintain his profile). Nothing like the steady returns and worldwide recognition that McDonalds enjoys.

The author of Naruto whom I don't admire enough to actually learn his name offhand has clearly put far more thought and heart into Naruto's backstory and motivations, character and mannerisms than Sasuke that really is the same tired old archetype of the dark foreboading loner. Yet paradoxically the imagination injected into Naruto is not rewarded by the readership, they want something easy and pallatable like McDonalds, instead of the complex and rich Snail Porridge that is Naruto.

The fun fact is that you don't get to pick your fans when you produce something.

The dilemma is do you give them what they want or do you stick to your guns. Do you deliberately write 'Money' to sell people 'The Dark Side of The Moon' not to say Money isn't a good or even worthwhile song, it's just these days you music isn't bought the same way, writing that hit single may not translate into anyone getting your album, it just sells itself.

I don't have the answer to this dilemma, probably because each one is different. It depends on the motivation. If you can't succeed at what you actually want to do, I would suggest you will have to live with that. You shouldn't let yourself be driven by what your fans demand.

My friend Tommi told me of friends that were criticising some bands new direction on some new album, he made an astute point: 'You can still listen to the old albums though, they can create new stuff and you don't have to listen to it.'

If you hate Kevin Smith's new stuff, just keep watching Clerks. He isn't obliged to keep making movies for you.

Conversely, if Tool's 10,000 days wasn't new enough for you (it wasn't for me) you can toss it aside as a redundant 'Lateralus Part 2: Not as good as Lateralus' (And in my view Lateralus wasn't as enjoyable as Aenima).

If the author really finds Sasuke interesting and more interesting to write about than Naruto, then I can just skip over or stop focusing on chapters that are dedicated to Sasuke's boring decent into evildom.

Fans have these choices though, its the creators who have the dilemma. Fans have to take what they are given and vote with their feet. But that vote isn't binding on the creator, the creator should create work they are proud of, that challenges them and brings them joy. They shouldn't just create money. I have no problem with artists actually earning a living, but if that cash-cow character, single or recipe is not used as a vehicle to sustain your creativity, you may as well be an accountant.

Last word goes to Bobby Chiu 'I would rather dig a ditch than have an art job I hate. I'd rather pick up trash than have an art job I hate. I would do anything for money rather than come home at the end of a day doing artwork I hate and be too tired to do artwork I love.' [paraphrased].

Evolution: Brain Wall

I'm reading 'Fooled by Randomness' by NNT at the moment, his precursor to 'The Black Swan' in a way it's kind of like reading a first draft of 'The Black Swan' but there is certainly a huge reallocation of emphasis onto the noise vs information distinction as opposed to prediction and rare events.

Anyway in the chapter 'Survival of the least fit' he makes a brilliant and profound argument captured by Solon's warning. That is Solon met the richest man in all of Greece and when asked by this rich dude if Solon knew of anyone more exulted than he, Solon proceeded to give the accounts of dead men that had died nobly in battle and lived respected lives. When the rich dude asked if Solon knew of anybody alive more exulted, Solon pointed out that the rich dude's life wasn't over yet, so he couldn't really say whether his life was that great yet.

This anecdote has so many applications, for example Steve Keen whose forecasts of doom and gloom for Australia's debt fueled property bubble have failed to materialise calls it 'calling the game at half time'. Keen like most economic prophets can accurately forecast the devestation, but when dealing with something as irrational as a property market, calling the 'when' is a lot more difficult.

Anyway Evolution. This is all to do with evolution, because success is a temporary and transitional state. One does not attain it permanently, or necessarily at all. One occupies it until they are evicted.

Now NNT claims that sooner or later everyone proclaims themselves an expert in evolution. I found this to be a personal challenge, as I've read 'The Selfish Gene' n shit and feel I am no lay member of the evolutionary theory crowd. But since I've devoted so many words to being an atheist on this blog, I thought I should write about evolution.

Firstly, you have to be a monkey fucking moron to not accept evolution. Namely the theory of natural selection. It is very simple, if you have two species occupying one planet. One experiences intense pain and anxiety when they commit a reproductive act, the other species experiences orgasmic pleasure, you would expect that in a very short number of generations the pain species population would be dwarfed by the pleasure species population, simply because they posess genes that encourage them to reproduce.

So evolution is really at its base simple, it says, simply, that traits that tend to aid survival, tend to survive. Ones that disadvantage survival, tend not to. Thus over multiple iterations (generations) like millions of years traits that help creatures survive eradicate the traits that disadvantage them.

Now Intelligent Design has absolutely no evidence for it whatsoever. The most common argument is one from probability - which is always going to be a dumb argument, they say that the odds of producing a species of parasite that live only in the kidneys of deep sea squid (highly specialised existence) are so low, it is the equivalent of flipping a coin a billion times and having it come up heads everytime.

Now if you buy this argument, then you don't understand natural selection. So given an environment (a deep sea squids kidney) and a bunch of genetic traits, you will have traits that allow you to survive in that environment and traits that disadvantage you in that environment. If we call the beneficial traits a 'heads' and the disadvantages 'tails' then here is how natural selection works. You flip a coin. If it comes up heads you flip it again, if it comes up tails you scratch it, then flip it again. Natural selection simply means that all the tails get removed from the results, not that they didn't occur. Only the heads keep going to play again.

The best thing about this process is that its blind, thus it needs no further explanation.

Now here is where I feel the need to defend myself against NNT's assertion that most 'proclaimed' experts on evolution get wrong. Not that we can see forward and predict what genetic traits will aid our survival, but that in some way everything is getting 'better' at surviving. That is we are evolving into super beings that will be harder and harder to wipe out.

I had this view corrected years ago when watching a guy talk about the future of retail. He called Department stores 'Dinosaurs' and put particular emphasis on the definition of a dinosaur, being a dumb animal that is very well adapted to its environment. The important part is that most life forms are very well adapted to survive in the present environment. What this guy taught me is that environments a re subject to change.

The process is blind, because genes can't tell what their environment will be. Just like Brain Wall they stand and wait to see whether they will pass through the hole in a styrofoam wall. But the thing is that what 'position' it takes to survive in a given environment is unknown and can be entirely arbitrary.



It could even be incredibly stupid. Imagine a parent gives birth to a kid that has flippers for arms and legs instead of arms and legs. This would probably be seen as a disadvantage in our current environment. But say within 10 years the polar icecaps melt and most of the world becomes flooded. Suddenly seal boy has a distinct advantage in surviving given his mobility in the expanded oceans (the predominant source of food). Enough humans survive, but seal-boy survives easily. Women who reproduce by him have a higher chance that their children will have this loser-turned-winner genetic 'defect', those children of his that have flipper like limbs will tend to survive better (picked off by less preditors) than those that inherit their mother's limbs. Within a couple of hundred generations one could expect that flipper limbs become a dominant trait in the human race.

Then low and behold the environment changes again, and the polar icecaps refreeze, creating vast fertile lands where once there were oceans. Suddenly those 'freaks' particularly adapted to land living (previously a handicap) are in a better position to survive. Seal-boys decendants die out, the monkeys thrive again.

These walls rush at particular species and wipe out millions of years of evolution constantly. Chomsky introduces his book 'Hegemony or Survival' with the question 'is it better for survival to be smart or stupid' this question is valid because the average lifespan for a species is something like 500,000 years. Homo-sapiens have the capability to wipe themselves out in less than a tenth of that time. A bacteria would go on prospering for millions of years. As Chomsky says, our best hope is that that question will never be answered.

All this reiterates that evolution as simple, and elegant and majestic as it is really quite stupid. There is no design. To think that our intelligence, our ability to learn, communicate share and adapt to changing environments (and change our environment) could actually be an evolutionary liability vs. the cockroach that is just plain fucking resiliant.

Now the 'Brain Wall' or as it was called in Australia 'Hole in the Wall' isn't quite the best analogy. What would represent evolution better is if you have a bunch of contestants faced with one hole. Only one is getting through as that wall comes on and the decision of who survives is quite arbitrary. The thing that would be hard to replicate on a tv show is that on the other side of the wall now that there is no competition the remaining contestant can reproduce up some children for the next wave.

That is evolution, we tend to resemble survivors. But everything that is alive today is descended from something that survived the past, nothing yet has survived the future.

Parents.

Janice came back from China last week, and our household imploded within three days.

One's relationship with parents is always going to be part luck, part design. By design I mean there's going to be a foundation for getting along because you are almost certain to adopt many of your parents values. And by luck I mean the age old cliche that gets poo-poo-ed far too quickly and dismissed that you can't pick your parents, you can't even decide to be born.

But peeps come in three varieties - Nourishing, Toxic and Blah. Nourishing people you should actively seek to spend time with wherever and whenever you can, Toxic people you should actively not spend time with, and Blah just be friendly to.

This goes for everyone, and I really have to emphasise it includes parents.

I chose to do something awful in the past couple of days and that was to tell Janice that she was 'border-line Toxic' this was an awful thing to do, but I did it because something had to give. Body-language can't lie and my siblings and I had been avoiding Janice like the plague. Everyone knew something was amiss and it was better to just break that negative silence than let it fester.

I said border-line and I meant it. Janice is a chronic worrier and always has been, and I know the 'Toxic' behaviour actually comes from a place of love and concern. Specific to me, she routinely gives me 'reality' talks. That is, for those that know me I'm currently restructuring and exploring my life. I want to take more risks and I feel fortunate to have been put in circumstances in the past that have allowed me to realise that what I want in life I can't buy with money. I have to work for it and work really fucken hard.

My mother gets anxious about the cost of undertaking this work, namely that I'll meet some partner and want a house and to send my kids to the best schools & shit. It's entirely plausible, the thing is I decided when I set out that these are the things I'm willing to put at risk to pursue what I want and that I will have to forgive myself and not be bitter at losing out.

Now, what I need is support and encouragement from peeps I know and 90% of the time I get it. But from my mother I get doubt and anxiety, I get long conversations that force me to apologise for my existence, push back and revisit all my doubts and anxieties. Over the years though it has become pure pushback, I told Janice that I just switch off the moment she mentions 'reality' and go into a mild depression.

It's bad, it's very bad because Janice percieves me as a wholy different person than most people. She sees me as an aggressive intimidating bully which for a large portion of my life I was, but now I suspect most peeps see me as a lovable douchebag.

What I articulated to Janice was that 'your choice is whether you are coming with me or staying behind.' which is an unfinished thought but I was thinking on the fly, the finish to it is 'you don't get to decide where I'm going.'

What makes it awful is that Janice is just another mum. Miki would have been quick to lecture me 'you don't understand about her feelings' but I do. I know everyparent is fallible to creating hopes and expectations for their child and then is going to experience undue anxiety when their child deviates from their imagined path.

Probably no parent on earth wants their child to consciously take a gamble on winding up a bum on the street in order to pursue some ideal and perhaps delusional career. But any individual can concievably make that choice and be at peace with it.

So I understand. I know some TRULY toxic parents, that don't even do the basics, like lavish love and support on a child in trouble, and my parents are not these parents. This is why I say I'm fortunate, I don't have to actually remove my parents from my life. We are quite capable of being friends, Ijust have to do awful things like tell them I no longer enjoy spending time with them.

And I'm sure now we will move through it and over time, hopefully the behaviours can change, I can stop defensively lecturing Janice, she can stop second guessing my life.

In another way I'm unfortunate. Choosing a career path is a choice, unlike sexuality and if I was gay I'm sure I'd never recieve talks about 'reality' from Janice and constant questioning of whether this was just a phase I was going through. My parents are that enlightened at least.

Now I need to speak about parents in general. I hold the view that some call childish but I shudder to contemplate what is implied in the alternative, that children owe their parents nothing and their parents owe their children their lives. Parents are responsible and accountable to their children and not the other way around. Whence children become adults then they can relate to their parents as they would to any other adult.

I think most peeps envision that I'm saying kids can act like a selfish fucking prick and parents just have to suck it up. Not at all. Parents have a responsibility to make sure their kids are taught to empathise, respect and have compassion and all the shit that having possession of makes life much easier. Much in the same way 'Anarchy' doesn't mean that peeps will instantly start killing whoever they want and raping the corpses.

This regards the important things, who someone loves, what somebody believes, what somebody does, who somebody is are all personal decisions and Parents recieve no special priveledges or indeed any say at all. Their choice is the same as Janice's they can decide to go along for the ride or they can stay home, they don't get to pick the destination of your lives.

Things like your hometown, where you go to school, if you are schooled etc. or more broadly speaking what Bill Gates called the 'ovarian lottery' (you have a 80% chance of being born into abject poverty and not surviving your first 12 months of life) such things are not really choices made by parent or child, a great deal of opportunity is pre determined. If you can survive infancy though, I think even the poorest of us have a great deal of choices left, and these choices should always be made by those who have to live it.

Everyone is a child of somebody and every child has the right to tell their parents to 'just fuck off'. For some people cutting their folks out of their lives completely is the right choice. For me an awful and uncomfortable conversation was hopefully the right call. I believe that my mothers intentions have always been beyond reproach and it is merely the articulation that is toxic, and that is relatively easy to change so long as you are made aware.

The sad irony is that Janice is one of those good mothers, and furthermore as she mentioned to me a lot of her anxiety comes from the fact she grew up in poverty both materially and emotionally. Everything I said of Janice she by rights could say 100 x over for her own parents, whom like I to her she still loves. I know she loves me, and doesn't want to become her own mother, which is why for me telling her I didn't appreciate her interrogating my life choices was the awful but easiest option.